See how OfficeDrop used Localytics features like screen flows and funnels to fix this problem. Learn how they tripled their user registration rate – the data they used, the decisions they made, and the ongoing improvements they’ve made to their app. Download the case study today.

73% of Android handset usage with the same OS build

Across all apps using Localytics, a full 73% of Android usage came from devices running a variant of Android 2.3. While the build, known as “Gingerbread”, is not the most recent, from a fragmentation perspective it should be good news to developers that such a large majority of users are running the same Android OS version.

Add Android 2.2 “Froyo” to the mix, and the majority becomes even more convincing – 23% of Android user sessions were running some flavor of “Froyo”. Between the two, Android developers can be confident that they only need to actively target two Android OS builds in order to achieve 96% compatibility with the Android ecosystem.

Most popular Android handset size is 4.3 inches

Another concern for Android developers is screen size and resolution. Of all app usage analyzed for this study, 41% of all sessions came from Android devices with 4.3 inch screens, by far the most popular size. 4 inch screens accounted for 22% of sessions, 3.2 inch screens for 11%, and 3.7 inch screens contributed 9%.

Resolutions were even less fragmented, however, with the most widely-seen screen resolution – 800 x 480 pixels – contributing 62% of the study’s sessions. The next most popular screen resolutions were 480 x 320 (14%), 960 x 540 (6%), 480 x 854 (5%) and 320 x 240 (5%).

For both screen size and resolution, Android developers have more to deal with than iOS developers, thanks to Apple’s single handset form factor. However, with five options accounting for more than 90% of all Android app usage, the fragmentation is not particularly daunting.

Android tablets showing similar patterns, Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet leading the way

For developers working on Android tablet applications, the fragmentation numbers are similar to those seen in handsets. Led by Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab – the three most widely-used Android tablets as measured by Localytics – nearly three quarters of all Android tablet usage is from devices with the same specs.

Screen resolution and size are actually even less fragmented than handsets – 74% of Android tablet usage takes place on 7 inch devices with 1024 x 600 resolution. 22% are 10.1 inch devices with 1280 x 800 resolutions, so by taking into account two screen size/resolution combinations, developers should be able to easily reach nearly all of the Android tablet market.

OS distribution is similarly stable, with 71% of Android tablets running Android 2.3 “Gingerbread”. Most of the remaining tablets are running some flavor of Android 3 “Honeycomb” – 14% are powered by Android 3.2, 7% by 3.1. The rest run “Froyo”.

Why Android developers should not be as worried about fragmentation

In all, while Android developers do have to think about an element of fragmentation foreign to iOS developers, the problem seems to be much smaller than made out to be. Android devices, particularly tablets, tend to be very similar in OS version, screen size and screen resolution. Although iOS developers only have two form factors to craft their applications for, the similarities of Android’s most-used devices should make it less of a challenge to develop for than often thought.

Methodology

For the purposes of this study, Localytics looked at the number of user sessions seen by apps running Localytics as their analytics provider. All data is usage-based. The time frame is the two-week period ending Jan. 22, 2012.

For All Users

Set default time zone for reports

Customers can now set the default time zone for all reports in the dashboard. To change your apps’ time zones, simply log into your Localytics dashboard, click on the Administration tab, and hit the Edit button on the applicable app. You will now find that, in addition to the app’s name and category, a drop-down menu for time zone is now available.

Improved session length analyses

Get even better insight into your users’ session lengths – your session length metrics now automatically filter out obviously erroneous session lengths (below zero seconds and above 24 hours). In addition to average session length, we now also report median session length.

For Premium and Enterprise

Monthly cohorts splits added to all charts

User-based cohort splits are now available in the Usage and Event charts, with cohorts determined by the time that users first launched your app. This gives another view of retention by splitting session, location, features and more by the month in which users were acquired. For example, view sessions by country and first month the app was used.

Weekly cohorts are also available with Advanced usage reports. Enterprise customers can add daily cohorts as a dimension in Query Builder.

New dimensions for Advanced Reporting and Query Builder

Premium and Enterprise customers can create and save custom charges by cross-tabbing any two dimensions. Query Builder goes a step further and gives Enterprise customers ad hoc, cross-app queries combining up to four dimensions through a simple web UI, with the results download directly to their computer. Three additional dimensions have been added to both the Advanced reports and Query Builder:

• Language (Locale)
• Daily, weekly and monthly cohort splits
• Jalibroken

For Enterprise

Custom dimensions

Custom dimensions are now available in Localytics dashboard charts. By creating custom dimensions you can segment your analyses with user profile data that specifically meet your needs, including gender, subscriber status, and purchaser vs. non-purchaser. Cross-tab your custom dimensions with other standard dimensions (most popular hour of the day for purchasers vs. non-purchasers, for example) and discover actionable insights into app usage.

For help getting your custom dimensions implemented, please contact Localytics support today.

In research from last year, Localytics found that 26% of apps are used only once after being downloaded. As a result, the app publisher community has made a concerted effort to shift away from incentivized downloads and towards engagement and overall customer lifetime value (CLV).

With this new data, that shift is shown to be even more important. With a high correlation between highly engaged users and in-app purchases, developers and publishers with a goal of maximizing CLV have even more reason to obsess over user retention. The more your users interact with your app, the more likely you are to get a chunk of the $5.6 billion in in-app purchases expected by 2015.

Engagement leads to higher CLV

Even more, the users who wait and interact with an app multiple times before making their first in-app purchase are more valuable in the long run, making 25% more in-app purchases over their lifetime as a customer. First session purchasers will make an average of 2.8 purchases in a given app during their user lifetime, compared with 3.5 purchases for all other purchasers.

While moving users towards a purchase as quickly as possible is often considered the primary objective, this data suggests that turning purchasers into loyal, repeat users should be a top priority. While a first-session purchase is an excellent result, our data found that only 16% of users who make a purchase their first app session will go on to engage with that app 10 or more times, compared with 26% of overall app users. Thus, it is imperative that app developers and marketers pay special attention to their analytics solution’s loyalty features.

Grow customer lifetime value

By building your app’s engagement and your brand’s presence in a user’s mind, you can generate better overall revenue based on a loyal base of repeat users. Given the 12 day average time between downloading an app and making a purchase, driving loyalty across a period of weeks will often generate greater revenue.

At Localytics, we help app developers and marketers build more successful and profitable apps with the highest possible CLV through retention analysis and using funnel analysis to optimize in-app purchases. To enable these analyses, app publishers track each purchase and the steps taken to complete the purchase. For the purposes of this study, Localytics analyzed nearly 30 million users’ in-app purchasing to extract patterns publishers can use to benchmark their own apps’ performance.

Apps Expand and Evolve

Apps for all those smart phones continue to be insanely popular with Apple reporting 18 billion downloads for iOS and Google reporting 10 billion downloads for Android. Apps also expanded far beyond their “mobile” heritage. iPads and other tablets may still be considered mobile, but many rarely leave the house. Then there are smart TVs, smart appliances and whatever else we’ll see emerge at consumer electronics shows next year.

The way apps are built and monetized continues to evolve too. In-app purchases and subscriptions are now very popular and successful additions to free, paid and ad-supported models. App publishers are also exploring new development languages and distribution models by adding HTML5 to the already popular Objective-C and Java.

We won’t offer yet another list of predictions for 2012, but we’re more excited than ever about the opportunities for apps and the role Localytics can play.

Thank You and Looking Forward to Next Year

All of us at Localytics want to thank our customers and partners for helping to push our business forward in 2011.

Cheers to an incredible 2011 and an even better 2012!

Localytics provides mobile analytics to top app publishers across over 200 million devices. A key metric tracked by publishers is how many new devices, or customers, use their applications. By calculating the number of new devices across its entire publisher base, Localytics can estimate the growth of iPhones, iPads, Android phones and other devices.

Localytics used the top 20 countries for mobile devices between December 1 and 20 to establish a baseline. The average daily activation rate for this period was compared to the average for December 25 and 26, to allow for devices given on Christmas to be activated the next day. The following chart summarizes the results.

Among these top 20 countries for mobile devices, Localytics saw a huge increase in both Apple iOS and Android activations over the Christmas holiday, with significant regional variation. The UK, US and Canada registered the highest growth rates, followed by other European and Latin American countries. Lower rates were seen in many Asian countries were Christmas is not as widely celebrated.

But like any good app developer, the Voxy team knew that downloads don’t tell the whole story – they need to know how users engaged with their app, and they need to continually improve engagement and retention. So Voxy turned to Localytics, using its app analytics platform to inform and test their marketing and product strategies.

This case study will detail how Voxy used Localytics features like daypart analysis, location analysis and screen flows to optimize their user experience for maximum user retention. Download the case study and learn how to maximize Localytics app analytics in your own apps.

More Funnels

Our funnel analysis helps app owners test in-app purchases, calls-to-action, subscriptions and registrations easily and effectively by organizing screens and events in to conversion funnels.  If you’re a Premium or Enterprise customer, this functionality is already implemented into your Localytics dashboard.  And now everyone gets more funnels; Premium customers can create up to five per app and Enterprise customers can create an unlimited number of funnels.

If you’re a Community subscriber and would like a free trial upgrade of Premium, contact us today.

Timezone Support

Customers can now set a default timezone whenever they create a new app, and all reports will be adjusted to the selected timezone. Soon, customers with existing apps will be able to also set a default timezone for all new data.

Language Analysis in Advanced Usage Charts

What language iPhone, iPad or Android devices are configured to use can be combined with location analysis for very actionable insights. Localytics Premium and Enterprise subscribers can now use advanced usage reports to see other metrics split by device language. For example, discover how much of the Hispanic market in the US has your app has captured, or evaluate whether your app should be released in another language.

Enterprise Management Screen

Managing your Localytics Enterprise apps has never been easier, thanks to our new Enterprise Management screen. Improved features include:

• Comprehensive view of all users in your enterprise
• Full control over permissions on a per-user basis, including persistent permission settings extending over multiple apps
• Ability to invite new users from within Enterprise administration
• Reset user passwords for other users in your enterprise

Please follow the Localytics blog for more updates. If you have a request for a new feature, we want to know and you’ll help us prioritize future releases.

Q: How can I do A/B testing?
Q: If I instrument my iPad app with Google Analytics, and want to do A/B testing, is there a way to use Google Website Optimizer as my A/B testing platform?
Q: For analytics & optimization, A/B testing is essential. Please describe my options. Thank you.

A: Yes, you can build A/B testing logic into your app. For example, you can present different content or options to different users, and tag an event for the path (or option) they saw. Then in Localytics you create funnels that start with that event and end at your goal to easily compare the results of users sent in different directions. and you start the two funnels each with the different event. That way you can compare the results very easily.

Web-style A/B testing in apps is still in it’s infancy, testing and optimization is currently restricted to apps that leverage HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the majority of their interface (Netflix, for example). By developing different UIs and assigning them to device IDs at time of app installation and activation (persisting them, of course) it is possible to measure user behaviour against specified KPIs by app UI to determine relative lift.

Q: If my app sends people to someone else’s website – where the purchase conversion takes place – what are my options for measuring / tracking that conversion?

A: Apps are sandboxed from each other and from the web, so many of the conversion tracking techniques used online are not available. In this case, you could pass referring information (e.g., app ID, Localytics ID, campaign ID) to the website where code on the website would then record the referrer and capture the conversion. Essentially, it is up to the destination web site where the conversion takes place to pass on conversion metrics. Of course, if they will let you place your own tracking codes on their conversion pages – all the better…

Q: Device collects data in chunks and transmits when device becomes online to Localytics data collection servers. Is that a correct assumption?

A: Yes that’s correct. During app usage the Localytics client library will cache all event data in local storage, even if the app is online. Then when scheduled by the app developer, but typically at the beginning and end of a session, or as part of a background service, the usage data will be compressed and uploaded to Localytics.

This is true for most vendor SDKs in that some data is sent upon app launch but it is up to the developer to instrument their app to send data at appropriate times during usage depending on current app processes. Best practice dictates that it is not prudent to send data to the collection servers upon each and every action but to batch requests to avoid overtaxing the devices data connection.

While not true batching of requests, Adobe has the ability to force the data collector ‘offline’ during processor intensive app routines and then return it to ‘online’ mode when complete. Additionally, using the offlineThrottleDelay function allows the developer to set the cadence (or delay) when sending requests to mitigate performance impacts once the application is online again.

Google SDKs allow for the batching of requests using the ‘dispatch’ method. It should be noted that with the Google SDK requests are set with a timestamp of when the app sends data to Google NOT when the action occurs.

Q: The fact that every big corporation is jumping into the app sea is not necessarily a measure of success. Are those apps really successful?

A: It certainly varies by company, just as not all websites are successful. How success is measured will also vary. But to offer an anecdotal example: Rue La La announced at Shop.org that 22% of their sales now come from mobile, which feels like a pretty great success. Also, eBay expects to see $5B in mobile revenue in 2011.

Q: How should Mobile Strategy be approached for applications that have already been launched with no or limited measurement

A: Fortunately, users upgrade the apps on their devices very quickly, so adding analytics to the next version of an already launched app is an easy first step. Beyond the basic integration and metrics, you’ll also want to think about how your goals and questions translate into event tags for your app. There are many tips and suggestions on the Localytics blog and either Localytics or Semphonic can share additional best practices or consulting services to quickly get you started.

Q: So you are saying that the main difference with mobile analytics compared to traditional online analytics is the implementation?
Q: What is really different from mobile analytics compared to regular online analytics? Is there really a difference?

A: Implementation differences are more effect than cause. The biggest differences are that apps and websites are both built and used very differently. Web analytics can safely assume that users are online (or they couldn’t reach the site) and that everything is received in chronological order at the time it happens. Web analytics are also more server-based and were not built to take advantage of PC/device APIs.

Apps may function completely offline, or suddenly lose connectivity, which dramatically changes how the implementation must be done and how data are cached, timestamped, uploaded, de-duplicated, etc. As mentioned on the call, Adobe SiteCatalyst report suites must be configured to support device timestamps, which then affects the rest of your SiteCatalyst deployment should you wish to rollup these report suites. Google analytics assumes that everything happens when it’s reported, which is hardly true when 15% to 25% of app usage happens while offline.

Other differences include web time-outs vs app multitasking, location based on source IP or device API, power and network conservation, etc.

Q: Do you have any stats regarding the mobile Canadian market? How much different do you think it is compared to the US market?

A: Canada is experiencing rapid mobile growth, however current adoption is far less than that in the US due to carriers not supporting the broad extent of smartphones found here in the US. This is changing rapidly, however and it is predicted that more than 425 million smarphones and tablets will be sold in 2011. Deloitte has some predictions on the Canadian mobile market here – http://bit.ly/uimnia

Q: To the best practice of separate profiles per channel: what about an iPad user hitting our regular fixed web site, should that go to a dedicated iPad suite or is it OK if that mixes with our desktop/fixed web suite?

A: Regular websites tend to work well on iPads (non-Flash of course!). Depending on your business, you may still want to have a version of your site optimized for iPads or build a cross-platform site with dynamic layouts (the new Boston Globe site is a great example).

It is recommended that you create separate profiles for your various channels so as not to conflate differing device types and/or platforms. Having separate profiles for fixed web, mobile web, and mobile apps is the preferred method and again this is based on device type NOT site type. So in response to the question, it is perfectly acceptable to have iPad traffic to your fixed web site be included within your existing web site profile.

This best practices paper will introduce suggestions and tips that can turn your m-commerce app users into buyers. As the app experience is completely different from a web-based ecommerce experience, approaching m-commerce from a fresh, app-specific perspective will help you avoid making mistakes brought on by web-driven misconceptions. All best practices can be achieved with Localytics as your solution for mobile app analytics.

Get the Mobile Ecommerce Best Practices for mobile apps white paper instantly and improve your mobile ecommerce app today.